OKC Training Round 2

Published: June 21, 2017

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OKC - Round 2

(Preface with pre-OKC update is located here, if you need some catching up.)

Yesterday I made the lovely, charming drive back down to the wonderful state of Oklahoma. No, I’m not transferring here, or moving here.

Rather, I’m back for another phase of my training as an Air Traffic Controller, this time, in the dark radar rooms. This phase of training is much, much different than my time down here last year. This time, training is not “punitive” or “job jeopardy.” Radar training is set up as a “workshop” – purely based for learning techniques and radar separation before having to do it in the real world. Radar training (which I may refer to as RTF) is approximately one month in length, also here at OKC at the MMAC.

This time on the blogs, I’ll probably give a brief overview of each day, but I will also write a “part 2 summary” of each day – where I will go a little more detailed into the labs, in an effort to provide a reference for future RTF students to use in order to feel prepared (or set at ease).

After checking into my hotel yesterday, I made a run to the grocery story to grab food for the week, and had a pleasant reminder of how bad traffic is here on the weekdays. This morning, class started at 7am. This time, though, no “visitor” lane, and no badging process, since I did all that last year and am already an employee, yay! It was a pretty smooth entry this time around compared to last year, and I drove right back up to Building 25 (the RTF building) and walked into the classroom (I didn’t feel as lost this year).

RTF - Day 1

This year, the mood is much more relaxed. This class does not include any new-hires and is all already-partially certified employees (new hires are very rarely sent to terminal radar-only facilities to start with, so this means those guys/gals all in center/enroute or tower classes across the street). The RTF instructor started by making some small talk, going over introductions, and making more than his fair share of jokes (but he’s funny, so I’ll allow it). Though it’s still early in the course, he seems passionate about what he does and genuinely interested at doing a good job and preparing us for our radar training back at our facilities.

The first hour was mostly housekeeping, schedules, directions to the microwaves, coffee, and bathrooms, more joke making, just the usual stuff. The general outline for the class will be roughly a week of classroom (8 days), followed by two weeks of labs (13 days). However, it appears that even during the week of classroom, there will be part-tasking activities (essentially, mini labs – more to come on these at a later time) as soon as tomorrow. For now, we are on a straight 7am-3:30pm schedule, and it sounds like that likely won’t change at all. There is at least one other RTF class in progress right now that I’ve seen, but I know a few more start in a few weeks.

It’s also a pretty small world down here, lots of familiar faces, and a lot of “do you know so-and-so from XYZ facility?” I guess it’s a friendly reminder to always be nice since everyone seems to have connections to someone.

For the rest of the day, we went over Academy Airspace, LOAs/SOPs (letters of agreement – with other facilities we work with in academy-land, and standard operating procedures for academy-land). Our instructor went over this information, and gave us a firm reminder that we are back in academy land (for some, the first time!) and things that work in the real world will most certainly *not* work here in academy land. We are not talking to real pilots or controllers anymore, this is all simulated and make-believe, specifically set up to teach us a certain lesson.

I believe tomorrow on the agenda I saw some radar lessons, specifically relating to separation (I could look ahead in the textbook, but I like a good surprise from time to time), and then possibly some part-tasking. I’ll update more on that, tomorrow.

Hopefully this provides a good overview of the RTF process, and where things are at so far. Expect further update… tomorrow!

"spread your wings and fly"